Posts by Anonymous Dutch Coward

'Occupy' affiliate claims Intel bakes SECRET 3G radio into vPro CPUs

Re: Phantom Power

The original one. Everybody knows the Rolls Royce one was an unreliable disaster ;)

Latest Snowden reveal: It was GCHQ that hacked Belgian telco giant

Or even 27002.

City of Munich throws Ubuntu lifeline to Windows XP holdouts

Re: Isn't it free already?

Maybe the OP was literate but one of those annoying Johnny Foreigners whose native tongues would have you use CD's as the plural of CDs. And he might have just slipped up a tiny bit.

However, I'd never stand in the way of a proper grammar bash, so bash away...

Borland's heir Embarcadero says one dev tool can rule them all

Lazarus

Agreed. You can even use interesting low-bloat GUI toolkits like fpGUI but I'm sure you know that already, soppie ;)

IETF floats plan to PRISM-proof the Internet

Re: Methinks quite rightly so, the more likely truth be .....

Nice try, but that was understandable punctuation and not nearly enough random capitals. Please try again!

Anatomy of a killer bug: How just 5 characters can murder iPhone, Mac apps

Bounty?

Or what about some KitKats ;)

Microsoft - do you really think you can take on Google with Nokia?

Ballmer's oracular statements

"By the early part of this year it was clear to me that perhaps acquisition would be a way to accelerate."

So it was clear to you that something may potentially lead to something else.... or in other words: "it was clear to me that acquisition could also decelerate [insert whatever it is]".

Very insightful.

As to what is being accelerated... well, I'd rather not speculate.

"I called [Nokia board of directors chairman] Risto [Siilasmaa] right after the first of the year sometime in January, early February. "

The first WHAT of the year? Public beheading of underperforming VPs? Bonfire? What?

NSA: NOBODY could stop Snowden – he was A SYSADMIN

Re: BTW, if the NSA allowed "Tor" or similar sytems to do remote login

Why lay the blame for the hiring/screening policies only at the contractor - it's the NSA who should have stipulated *and enforced* good policies (and practice!) by the contractor...

HMRC nabs 5 after £500k 'cyber attack' on tax systems

No incomprehensible charge here

If the charge is really "cheating the Revenue", that sounds like a refreshing departure from the usual legal mumbo-jumbo.

Thumbs up (in that respect) for the cash-collecting government minions from across the water!

Marc Andreessen, Pat Gelsinger in verbal VMworld brawl

Encryption

Additionally, encrypting incoming and outgoing traffic is well and good, but unencrypted data at rest/inside the cloud provider is still at risk from provider personnel and depends on regular physical/logical access security of the cloud data center anyway.

Waving "encryption" around as a magical solution is just PR.

Four ways the Guardian could have protected Snowden – by THE NSA

Re: How about strapping a micro-SD card to a homing pigeon's leg?

Yep, it was on the Register. Pigeons between Howick and Durban, IIRC.

BTW: anybody heard of homing rats?

Jolla's first Sailfish phone preorders 'fully booked'

Illegal versus DMCA

Are you sure? Interoperability was IIRC one of the few loopholes DMCA allows... Can't be bothered to verify though.

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

If I were the UK queen, I'd rather emigrate to Iceland. Seems a lot better for one's mental health than trying to get to change civil servants/security services to change their ways.

PS: Shame there's no polar bear icon...

Alien antique show: Egyptians wore JEWELRY FROM SPAAAACE

Re: Sorry

So they weren't slippery characters, more... treacly, right?

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Re: Article incorrect to suggest they were Ultra Viries...

So basically that law gives the government the right to detain whom they please - without even having to think up an excuse about the victim being a terrorist?

Great.

BTW, this part of the article:

"This is a routine hazard for people of interest to spooks or serious police investigations, and it could be seen as a little odd that Greenwald, Miranda and Poitras didn't anticipate it."

is rather nasty, isn't it? Why shouldn't you use a laptop etc if you're "a person of interest"? It's not their fault that western legal systems get corrupted by these 1984 style laws, is it?

Icon because that's the only thing that will save my blood pressure now.

OWN GOAL! 100s of websites blocked after UK Premier League drops ball

Re: Sue FAPL for redress

I don't know how the legal system works over in the UK but the judge gave the court order, didn't he? So he should be responsible for the mess.

What he then chooses to take out on FAPL is his concern, but not something the poor (sniff) sites that have been wrongfully blocked should have to concern themselves with.

Google follows Amazon with auto-encryption of cloud data

@Craigness: Re: Encryption needs to be on the client side to be secure

How do you know?

Re: Who wrote this article?

@John Smith: no, not really: the last paragraph was about using quantum computing to attack the encryption.

I suspect RISC OS's concern (and certainly it would be mine) is Google just handing over the key to the 3 letter agencies - no crypto attack required.

Re: How does this reassure concerns...

@Steve: correct.

Also I'm very surprised the article text itself doesn't contain this info.

YouTube Wars: Microsoft cries foul as Windows Phone app pulled again

Re: Some toy throwing going on here.

"M$ neither licensed nor asked permission before reverse engineering the private API, and subsequently threw the toys out of the pram when Google shut them down."

Wellll...

I vaguely remember IP law has provisions to allow reverse engineering these kinds of APIs for interoperability reasons. [1]

E.g. Google's copying API headers from Java was not deemed an infraction on Java IP.

Whether Google are within their rights to subsequently block anything with a Redmond whiff knocking at their API... that I can't say... and can't be bothered to try and find out...

[1] Didn't even the DMCA have some provisions for that?

Google: Cloud users have 'no legitimate expectation of privacy'

EU response

The EU response will be absolutely zilcho, nothing, nada - just look at the so-called "Safe Harbor" to make is possible for EU companies to store confidential/client data in the US without falling foul of EU data regulators.

It is in effect an admission that the US (i.e. a foreign government) may unleash the Patrioat act ("the government can look at the data even without telling us") on EU data.

After this, do you really think EU government instituions will care?

Re: Indeed

I agree with your explanation about email providers not being allowed to read the contents of the email in general... but in this case, yes, Gmail has specifically mentioned they would do this (even if not in red letters) when the user signed up.

Too bad many people don't read T&Cs. That's really their problem.

However, ISPs etc suddenly doing deep packet inspection, reading email contents without it being contractually agreed with the customer, *is* a problem, yes.

Larry Ellison: Google is ABSOLUTELY EVIL, but NSA is ESSENTIAL

Re: Oracle--the official database of the Five Eyes!!

Ehm yes, but I think you'd better replace:

<<next time an American politician says he wants to "reach across the aisle" or promote "bipartisan engagement" [....] to fuck you over>>

with

<<next time any politician says anything [....] to fuck you over>>

No distro diva drama here: Penguinista favourite Debian turns 20

Re: It's a slippery slope down that rabbithole

You might even start growing a beard ;)

Deutsche Telekom launches 'NSA-busting' encrypted email service

Re: EU wide please

It's useless. The proposed German system would also turn over the unencrypted data to the authorities. This may mean the NSA would not snoop on you (or have to work harder at it, i.e. by asking the German government nicely), but our own "democratic" governments would still be able to do so...

I'll get my coat with the GPG man page printout now...

Re: Totally secure

I think you need to bring your irony detection unit in for servicing...

Yes. And your point is?

Obama proposes four-point plan to investigate US data spooks

Re: The NSA has naught but garbage

I'd be fine with them spending American taxpayers' money if they weren't using that money to spy on me and everybody else. Yes, including whatever cat pictures I care to send to whomever.

Of course the world isn't kept safe by massively indexing garbage. But budgets are and you never know if you find somebody with an outstanding parking ticket... or somebody Googling for pressure cookers and backpacks.

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

Re: Better solution

Perhaps the term you're looking for is "useful figurehead". Get him out, get somebody else in... repeat n times... - nothing changes....

Snowden's secure email provider Lavabit shuts down under gag order

Re: something decent to watch on TV

Well, as long as are all suggestions of nipples are blurred and all potential swearwords are beeped out, there's certainly nothing indecent....

Patching Xerox's number-changing photocopy phlaw will take weeks

Re: So "normal" is *no* "factory default."

Yep. Looks like the confusion is at the supplier end, not the customer end. As for the frustration, well... even I am getting frustrated without being even near a Xerox (long may that trend continue)!

Silent Circle shutters email service

@ ilmari: there is no security

Looks likes your post boils down to "there is no absolute security", which is of course correct. However, IIRC, Silent Circle is apparently happy to provide "secure" VOIP communication while email comms are supposedly not secure enough.

I have some trouble believing e.g. PGP enabled email cannot be made as secure as PGP (or SRTP or whatever it's called) enabled VOIP.

Google sniffs at MySQL fork MariaDB: Yum. Have an engineer

Yes, he's being a bit disingeneous to say the least.

Happy 20th birthday, Windows NT 3.1: Microsoft's server outrider

@AC 01:00 Re: Linux graphics runs in the kernel, too.

Compile it straight into the kernel or have it as a loadable module that gets loaded into the kernel... the driver ends up in the kernel process anyway....

Terror cops swoop on couple who Googled 'backpacks' and 'pressure cooker'

Re: [Scene: Front door, external]

"Welease this man"?

New NSA tool exposed: XKeyscore sees 'nearly EVERYTHING you do online'

@Matt Bryant Re: Potty Don't forget the rest.

That must be why that US Revolution thingy was nipped in the butt, wasn't it?

Dutch banks get nod to inhale Amazon cloud

DNB are idiots

Even if the data center in question is located in Ireland, the US PATRIOT act (or whatever silly law it was) still applies: US company Amazon (or a subsidiary) operates the data center =>US gov can inspect data at any time.

Apart from that: yes, NSA snooping seems quite likely, too.

Goodbye, client confidentiality and adherence to Dutch/EU privacy regulations.

I wonder though what DNB really said.

Mostly they're very wishy washy and love general business speak platitudes - they might have said something like "well, Big Bank, if you want to outsource stuff to Amazon, it's your problem and your responsibility to (have Amazon) comply with legal requirements. We can't really be bothered to look into what those Amazon guys are doing so we're content with just not saying no in advance and going after your sorry ass once problems have occurred... ehm of course that should be when problems have been reported on loudly in the press"

Comrade! If you dare f$%^ing swear on the internet, WE'LL SHOOT

Re: I'm totally fed up with swearing ...

Ehm, that's not fucking swearing now, is it? It's using euphemisms to almost swear.

Jeez.

Texas students hijack superyacht with GPS-spoofing luggage

@Wzrd: Seeing is believing

Unfortunately, as I've found out in the IT security field, seeing is often believing.

Demonstrating a dead simple attack has managers ooh-ing and aah-ing while writing up the same thing in a report gets questions like "yes, my tech guys tell me this can happen but aren't you all bullshitting?".

Re: This is an issue for incompetent crew only IMO.

This is actually an issue for all crews, I'd say.

Crews routinely rely on their instruments to provide them with correct data. They tend to believe what their instruments tell them - it's human nature. Only a paranoid would go out and check if the GPS is right all the time.

Pirate icon because... well, it's obvious, really.

FSF passes collection plate for free Android clone Replicant

Free...

The insistence of some groups to redefine the word free keeps amusing me:

"not meet the FSF's criteria for software freedom.

Specifically, the Apache License does not require Google to release all of its source code"

freedom... require... yep.

Mind you, I do understand why those FSF guys make the distinction between free as in give it a way and their idealistic hippie-tinged idea of what 'free" should really mean... and it has helped keep e.g. Linux vibrantly alive but I'm not averse to some MIT or BSD licensed goodness...

Paypal makes man 1000x as rich as the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE

Re: @Zmodem

I was inclined to tell you what to wave about but on reflection... please don't.

Screw it, says NSA leaker Snowden: I'm applying for asylum in Russia

US Navy Target

Apart from the fact that the US Navy has zero jurisdiction on the high seas... unless they of course think that ship is a pirate ship etc.

The coat with the book on Law of the Sea is mine, thanks.

Microsoft waves goodbye to Small Business Server

Re: .. point where they can be managed by the clueless click monkeys ..

Yep. The components are there: Samba 4 for Active Directory/file sharing, Sogo/OpenChange as an Exchange drop-in replacement, Apache/whatever web server etc.

There are some small business-oriented "all-in-one" distributions like SME Server (former E-Smith), ClearOS (former ClarkConnect) and Zentyal. Haven't looked at them lately - hope they incorporate AD and Exchange functionality now...

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

Scheißsturm=eat inside of cheek?

Not if you're German it won't. I can even manage as a Dutchman... Just emphasize those ess sounds ;)

Fedora back on track with Schrödinger's cat

A new keyboard...

... if I had been drinking coffee:

"a series of animated tutorials to help you get a handle on the counter-intuitive interface that is GNOME 3."

ROFLMAO.

Yes, why not have some tutorials for an interface nobody understands instead of fixing the interface.

Glad to see a Reg article with an author who firmly takes a position instead of regurgitating press releases.

AMD joins LibreOffice, adds GPU grunt to free software suite

@AC: Slow Calc cause

If you follow the dev lists: they have been asking WHY it is slower. A Calc rewrite was started that would significantly improve speed. Don't know if it's finished yet - don't have very complex spreadsheets myself :)

Re: Another nail in the MS Office Coffin...

Yep, and they're working on replacing the standard embedded HSQLDB with embedded Firebird this summer (Google Summer of Code project). Hope this will improve Base functionality.